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Friday, April 30, 2010

Faced with PeopleSoft Fading Away, What Are Customers' Choices?

PARIS
Not a single day goes by without an announcement, a blog post, or a customer’s complaint that drives a further nail in the coffin of PeopleSoft. The recent announcement by HP, an old customer of PeopleSoft, that instead of relying on PeopleSoft, it will build its own workforce planning system came as a bombshell. One of their VP’s expressed his frustration in no uncertain terms, "…we were always hoping that that next PeopleSoft version was going to incorporate the changes that we were talking to that firm about. They rarely did," (full story here ) . End of the line for PeopleSoft doesn’t come any clearer. As HR tech blogger-in-chief Naomi Bloom showed in an excellent piece (look for the post on Product Update :PeopelSoft 9.1 which has been temporarily retired under pressure from Oracle, but read the comments, they are illuminating) PeopleSoft product updates are just marketing gimmicks, like a bone thrown to a dog, aiming at making customers buy into the myth that the product is still being enhanced until it is buried once and for all. Did you really expect that Oracle spent billions to buy a product, universally recognized as better than its own, just to continue competing with it? Of course not, the idea was to kill all competing products (others include Siebel, Hyperion et al.) thus obliging customers to migrate to Oracle’s product, EBS, rebranded as Fusion under the pretense that it is a “new” product combining the best of all its acquired product portfolio. Only customers under the influence of intoxicating substances will fail to see that under the hood of Fusion is good ole Oracle EBS code.
Also to take into account is one of Oracle’s best-kept secrets: a good third of its PeopleSoft customer base is on IBM technology (the DB2 platform). Since the Fusion product will only run on Oracle database, that means these customers will either have to switch technologies to adopt the Fusion application (something most are loath to do, since underlying-technology choices take precedence over the business software that sits on top of it) or they will have to look at other options.

So what are the legions of increasingly frustrated PeopleSoft customers to do? Apart from being mad, which I can understand but doesn’t help much, the choices in increasing order of relevance are the following:

1. Do nothing. You may be surprised by this option (which I do not recommend) but never underestimate the power of apathy that certain customers have. “Unless and until the current product stops fulfilling our business needs why bother?” Seems to be their philosophy. I’d have nothing against this display of the power of inertia, so to speak, but playing the ostrich and waiting until the last moment is a recipe for disaster. In this case, as in many others, it pays to do a little contingency planning.

2. Use a third party vendor that provides support for Oracle's doomed products (JDE, PeopleSoft, Siebel) at a fraction of the Oracle price. Rimini Street is one of them, and Oracle is going to great lengths, not less through litigation, to prevent such services from being rendered. As a customer, don't be intimidated: you've already paid through the nose for the PeopleSoft product and are entitled to get a longer lease on its life at reasonable prices. Why would you continue to cough up extortionate prices until Oracle pulls the plug on life support?

3. Wait for the successor product, Fusion HCM, to arrive and when it does switch to it (that is if your database is Oracle, see earlier point made about IBM users). Isn’t Oracle promising that the HCM Pillar (that’s their jargon) would be as good as PeopleSoft HCM, Oracle HRMS etc.? That upgrade “help” would be available? (something one can expect when two products are made by the same vendor) Well, remember Oscar Wilde’s quip that only those who believe in promises are bound by them. Didn’t Oracle, when it bought PeopleSoft, commit they would support it till Doomsday? But recent developments have shown what that commitment actually meant: a boon for the vendor to further milk the customer without producing much in return, and much angst for the customer. As for that upgrade/migration help it is increasingly clear that it is not going to be a tool but just a vaguely described “guide.” In other words, PeopleSoft HCM customers will have to reimplement a new HCM system. In that case why not shop around? It’s not as if Oracle is the only game in town (yet). There are still plenty of choices.

4. If integration to an ERP system is important to you and you are part of the big proportion of PeopleSoft customers that run SAP for Financials, Manufacturing and other business functions, then start considering SAP HCM seriously. Sure, they are not as sexy and user friendly as PeopleSoft, but, sorry, PeopleSoft is dead, so once you get over your grieving, negotiate with SAP (who are guaranteed to bend over backwards to accommodate you) and sign with them. Now, if your ERP is…Oracle, you need to consider choice number 5.

5. Independent HCM suite: here it depends on your needs: if you’re a purely domestic company then pick Lawson (if in the US only), or Meta4 (if you’re in the Hispanic market), or Northgate in the UK. If you’re considering a SaaS model, then have a look at Workday (a promising product, even if still work in progress.) The larger question here is who will replace PeopleSoft as HR’s tool of choice and it will be the object of another blog post, so watch this space.

6. You may well have two or three separate HR projects, one for an HR system of record, one for Payroll and one for Talent Management. In that case if one of the previous (#4) vendors doesn’t cover all your needs, you’ll have to select one HR SOR, a different TM suite (SuccessFactors or Taleo spring to mind) and, if a single global payroll is not your thing, select a combination of local payrolls.

Whatever you do, learn from your experience and make sure that you pick a vendor that will not over-charge you for every update or imposed migration. And protect yourself with a contract with teeth that considers every M&A eventuality or change in product strategy. Once bitten twice cautious, I’d say. This is no time to be shy about your interests as a customer.

5 comments:

Thanks for the Workday mention. Give a shout out if you'd like to take a deeper look at the product and what we're doing. Always happy to help out in that regard. I think you'll find we're moving along quickly in building out a new ERP suite, starting with HR and Payroll, on SaaS. I'll reference a recent post by Naomi Bloom http://www.enterpriseirregulars.com/15578/product-update-workday-10/ as a good entry point. Cheers

"The apparent firestorm Naomi set off will not die down any time soon. New voices are entering the fray and Oracle will not be able to silence them all. Ahmed is expressing what many of us have thought and providing the evidence to back up his theory"

I came across your blog when I was googling 'Peoplesoft dying'. The question is why would one google something like this ? Well, I'm afreelance technical Peoplesoft consultant for eight years. I was a Vantive consultant first but when Peoplesoft bought Vantive, I jumped on toPeoplesoft. It was very much to my disliking that Oracle bought Peoplesoft at the time that I matured in the product. Needless to say, thequestion whether I made the right choice or not popped up quite a few times after the acquisition by Oracle.

Well, as it turns out. I made the wrong choice. I believe just as you wrote that Peoplesoft has come at the end of its lifespan. There are moreconsultants out there looking for a job than there are jobs available. I have been job hunting for 4 months and had numerous interviews but the rates were / are terrible. There is no demand for Peoplesoft at the moment. There is a trend that large consulting companies like Cap Gemini, Accentureare taking over the remains of this market and that, for the self-employed amongst us, we have to be happy with the bread crums that they spill. In otherwords, the jobs that they don't take on because they can't make money of it.

Yes, Peoplesoft is dead. Oracle has done it again. Just like it did with Siebel. There are no jobs in Siebel either.

Although rumors are that Oracle is now developing HCM 9.3, I'm inclined to think that they are just throwing a bone at their customer base with the premise 'you see guys, we don't abandon you.'. I live in Belgium and there is nothing, zero work in Peoplesoft unless you become an employee for a fore-mentioned Cap Gemini or Accenture. Sure, there will be businesses that won't migrate to whatever Oracle will come up (bugfest for sure) so other companies may partake in providing maintenance services for those 'infidels' who don't migrate to Fusion.

I don't know how the market is in France. I got some calls from agencies for implementation work on Peoplesoft CRM and some HCM but rates are extremely low in the parisienne area and the expenses to live in Paris during the week are pretty high.

So, what are you doing with the demise of Peoplesoft ? Are you looking at another product ? Like you mentioned Workday. I heard of them but it's based on SaaS and that's a market freelancers will not be able to enter, I believe.

I have decided to leave Peoplesoft behind. I'm still looking for something else, we'll see what the future brings.

Why not strategy 1? IMO, PeopleSoft will not go away anytime soon. I'm still seeing plenty of PeopleSoft and EBS customers investing in their respective platforms and even some new implementations. Like you said, migrating to Fusion really means going through an RFP and reimplementation. Oracle knows this. I think Oracle has already choked on Fusion and will end up bundling its middleware for customers who want to use jDeveloper tools such as SOA Suite or ADF to build their own presentation layers but still using PeopleSoft and EBS as the core business logic layer. That is a strategy that makes sense and one that Oracle will probably be forced to follow. Of course, they will call it "Fusion" and say that it was always the plan to do it that way...

About the blogger

A global business and HR technology expert, I live in Paris,France where I was born, after stints in North Africa, the US (where I went to college), Spain (where I worked for the UN) and Brazil (my second home during my freelance years.) A strong believer in the dual role of HR and cloud technology to enhance corporate performance, these convictions are voiced in journal articles, at conferences and in blog posts. My hobbies include swimming, movies and literature. I am also the proud author of "High-Tech Planet", a rare business novel set in the IT industry (available from Amazon: http://amzn.to/czf0qw.) A relentless multilingual globe-trotter, you can see a sample of my detailed captioned pictures at http://bit.ly/dBcJkw. To quote Charlemagne: "to have a second language is to have a second soul." I also NEVER TAKE THINGS AT THEIR FACE VALUE. Challenge the received wisdom and go beyond first impressions: you'll be amply rewarded - that's my philosophy.
I can be reached at: contact@AhmedLimam.com.
NOTE: The thoughts expressed in this blog reflect my own, personal views not those of any of my employers, current or past.